This paper contributes to the development of an under-utilized area of focus for CSCW research and design: history. The design and evaluation of technology, as practiced in the field, has positioned CSCW as a largely forward-looking community. The enduring ‘presentism’ and lack of historical view threatens to leave out a wealth of resources that can inspire design, support comparative analysis, and develop a deeper understanding of technology development and its social consequences. This paper argues that a historicist sensibility should inform the due diligence of all CSCW research, and we present connection points for the various ways in which historical research might more deeply inform CSCW, while offering a selection of historiographic challenges to sensitize CSCW scholars as we seek to better situate our collective work within both the present moment as well as ongoing temporal change.
User experience (UX) professionals’ attempts to address social values as a part of their work practice can overlap with tactics to contest, resist, or change the companies they work for. This paper studies tactics that take place in this overlap, where UX professionals try to re-shape the values embodied and promoted by their companies, in addition to the values embodied and promoted in the technical systems and products their companies produce. Through interviews with UX professionals working at large U.S.-based technology companies and observations at UX meetup events, this paper identifies tactics used towards three goals: (1) creating space for UX expertise to address values; (2) making values visible and relevant to other organizational stakeholders; and (3) changing organizational processes and orientations towards values. This paper analyzes these as tactics of resistance: UX professionals seek to subvert or change existing practices and organizational structures towards more values-conscious ends. Yet, these tactics of resistance often rely on the dominant discourses and logics of the technology industry. The paper characterizes these tactics as partial or “soft,” but also argues that they nevertheless hold possibilities for enacting values-oriented changes.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479499
Techlash encapsulates a breaking point reached with the critique of technology companies. To investigate how this whirlwind of rage, inquiry, and accountability affects the lives of tech workers, we conducted interviews with 19 tech workers. Our methodological approach adopts a style of writing and analysis associated with anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, where we focus on the affective textures of critique in an attempt to redirect the temptation to representational thinking to a slowed ethnographic practice. Through this approach, we find that emotional habitus, a social group's emotional dispositions honed by tech culture's rationality and optimism, conditions the possibilities of personal and political action and inaction in response to critique. We suggest this habitus must shift if people are to access new ways of emoting and thereby adopt more fruitful attitudes and exercise towards critique.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449253
While the Internet has dramatically increased the exposure that research can receive, it has also facilitated harassment against scholars. To understand the impact that these attacks can have on the work of researchers, we perform a series of systematic interviews with researchers including academics, journalists, and activists, who have experienced targeted, Internet-facilitated harassment. We provide a framework for understanding they types of harassers that target researchers, the harassment that ensues, and the personal and professional impact on individuals and academic freedom. We then study preventative and remedial strategies available, and the institutions that prevent some of these strategies from being more effective. Finally, we discuss the ethical structures that could facilitate more equitable access to participating in research without serious personal suffering.
Recent years have seen an increased interest in ethically responsible design of technology in society at large as well as among design practitioners. While design ethics is a well-established research area, few studies have enquired into how design practitioners understand ethics. Through semi-structured interviews we have explored practitioners’ approaches to ethics in design. Our findings show noticing, reflecting and reacting as three ways that ethical matters are approached. This ties into dynamic and participatory views on ethics, rather than viewing ethics as a set of formal frameworks and deductive reasoning practices. Practitioners need approaches that tie in to existing work practices. Our results provide practice-led suggestions and points of departure of when and how it might be suitable to infuse design ethics into design practice.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449204
While studies have shown that graduates from elite universities enjoy high employment rates, they do not tell the story of how students from different social class backgrounds experience the hiring process. We address this question by interviewing upper-middle-class (UMC) and working- and middle-class (WMC) Computer Science Ph.D. students at prestigious universities who are applying for lucrative internships at established technology companies. We find that while these students are aware of and have access to the “same†resources (e.g., social connections and insider knowledge about employers’ expectations), the tactics they use to act on these resources and their emotional experience of the hiring process vary along social class lines. In short, the class-based norms of UMC applicants align with those of employers. The majority of WMC applicants, however, discuss experiencing tension between their class-based norms and employers’ dominant values. In contrast to their UMC counterparts, these applicants report spending substantial amounts of time preparing for the hiring process and describe the hiring process as emotionally draining. This research provides insight into the emotional burdens facing even the most privileged WMC applicants. Our findings also have implications for how organizations should take into account social class backgrounds in their hiring practices.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479536
Modern machine learning and computer science conferences are experiencing a surge in the number of submissions that challenges the quality of peer review as the number of competent reviewers is growing at a much slower rate. To curb this trend and reduce the burden on reviewers, several conferences have started encouraging or even requiring authors to declare the previous submission history of their papers. Such initiatives have been met with skepticism among authors, who raise the concern about a potential bias in reviewers' recommendations induced by this information. In this work, we investigate whether reviewers exhibit a bias caused by the knowledge that the submission under review was previously rejected at a similar venue, focusing on a population of novice reviewers who constitute a large fraction of reviewer pool in leading machine learning and computer science conferences. We design and conduct a randomized controlled trial closely replicating the relevant components of the peer-review pipeline with 133 reviewers (master's and junior PhD students of top US universities) writing reviews for 19 papers. The analysis reveals that reviewers indeed become negatively biased when they receive a signal about paper being a resubmission, giving almost 1 point lower overall score on a 10-point Likert item (\Delta = -0.78, 95% CI = [-1.30, -0.24]) than reviewers who do not receive such a signal. Looking at specific criteria scores (originality, quality, clarity and significance), we observe that novice reviewers tend to underrate quality the most.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449149
Scholars have previously described how online communities engage in particular discourses and forms of argumentation. In parallel, HCI and STS researchers have described discourses surrounding ethics and values and their role in shaping design processes and outcomes. However, little work has addressed the intersection of ethical concern and the discourses of non-expert users. In this paper, we describe the argumentation strategies used by Redditors on the subreddit 'r/assholedesign' as they discuss ethically problematic design artifacts. We used content and sequence analysis methods to identify the building blocks of ethical argumentation in this online community, including ethical positioning when raising issues of concern, identification of potential remedies to the original design artifact or issues of concern, and means of extending or negating these elements. Through this analysis, we reveal the breadth of ethical argumentation strategies used "in-the-wild" by non-experts, resulting in an increased awareness of the capacity of community members to engage in "everyday ethics" regardless of specific ethics training. We describe future opportunities to connect these ethical argumentation strategies with design practices, education, and methods.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449144